Rem Koolhaas

Deciding what to make of a Rem Koolhaas building is always a little tricky. The Dutch architect and his Rotterdam-based firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, have long aimed for a balance between the gracefully composed and the provocatively unsettled. While OMA's designs can be beautiful in their own deadpan way, they also tend to be decidedly aloof and use unfinished, unglamorous materials. They dare us to reveal our own philistinism by calling them cold, brutal or garish.

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's board met in April to approve a proposal for a major expansion of its Wilshire Boulevard complex, its members certainly breathed a collective sigh of relief. Until now, the museum's physical development has been an architectural horror story. Soon after it opened in 1965, its reflecting pools were famously paved over when oil began seeping into them from the nearby La Brea Tar Pits. A clumsy addition was built in the mid-1980s.

"Bold," "revolutionary"--such words are tossed off so casually today that they have nearly lost all meaning. But the design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, unveiled Thursday by the museum's board, is the rare project that deserves such praise. The design is a temple for a mobile, post-industrial age, set amid LACMA's bucolic, tree-lined park.

On a night when millions of Chinese revelers set off fireworks for the end of the Lunar New Year, one display Monday night sent a 44-story hotel up in flames, killing a firefighter and injuring 30 other people. The dramatically angled building designed by Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren was part of a new headquarters complex for CCTV, scheduled to open later this year. The main part of the center, shaped like trousers, did not appear to be damaged.

Eli Broad is a little further along in his plans for a downtown museum than you might have guessed. Even as he continues to negotiate with city and county officials and with representatives of developer Related Cos. about building a museum to hold his collection of postwar and contemporary art on Bunker Hill, the billionaire philanthropist and his chief of staff, Gerun Riley, have been running an invited architectural competition for the project....

August 19, 2007 | Christopher Hawthorne, Christopher Hawthorne is a Times staff writer.

"IF you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them." To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.

Prince Hitachi of Japan will present awards to architect Rem Koolhaas, director Ken Loach, sculptor Mario Merz, painter Bridget Riley and conductor Claudio Abbado at a ceremony in Tokyo today. The Praemium Imperiale international art award, which comes with a diploma, a gold medal and $125,000, rewards extraordinary achievements in the arts. An international jury nominates the candidates and the winners are selected by the Japan Art Assn.

In May, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art selected five architects to compete for the commission to design a $200-million renovation and expansion of the museum. In November, a selection committee narrowed the field to two, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Paris-based Jean Nouvel. On Wednesday the full board of trustees saw all five designs for the first time, then voted unanimously for Koolhaas.